Category: VAX 11/780

I got this note from Allen Garvin, that details his adventure in taking a stock 4.2BSD VAX image, getting it running on SIMH, and turning on the network stack.

Although 4.2 may have had security issues, (R Morris), and had some clear issues with scaling. Along with a whole host of other issues. Naturally if you want something more ‘robust’ on modern networks, you’ll want 4.3BSD which corrected quite a number of issues.

You can read about it over on his blog. It’s very good with step by step instructions, goes over retrieving the NIC driver, re-building the kernel, and getting it operational on our LAN.

&gt;I've seen people that use System V and the like refer to their Unix as
&gt;"tenth edition" or "ninth edition", or whatever. I've always seen things as
&gt;"System V release n", or whatever. Anyone know the difference between these
&gt;different naming schemes ?
There are actually three designations: Versions, Editions, and
System/Releases. The proper names of the first six Unixen were
"The #th Edition". Colloquially, people called them "Version #".
The Version Sixth Edition split off several variations, one of which
became Version Seven (the Seventh Edition) and sired BSD. From
several others, System III was born, and later named System V.
Tacked onto this name were Release numbers and yes, Versions.
So you will see things line SVr3v2.
The Eighth, Ninth, and Tenth Editions seldom left Bell Labs
and are also referred to as "Research UNIX". Another system
(not UNIX) they are playing with is called "Plan 9". Every so
often, a feature, such as STREAMS, finds its way into System V.
In some ways, Research UNIX is closer to BSD than to System V.

In short, UNIX began it’s life as a research project. Until recently versions 1-6 & 32v were available to the public. However the later versions, 8,9,10 were not. However thanks to the work over at TUHS it’s available for non commercial use:

Alcatel-Lucent USA Inc has permitted usage saying "will not assert its
copyright rights with respect to any non-commercial copying, distribution,
performance, display or creation of derivative works of
Research Unix®1 Editions 8,9, and 10."

So awesome!

The version of Research v8 is split onto 2 tape images, one for the graphical terminals, and the other for the OS install onto the VAX. The distribution is not suitable for any standalone operation, and requires a previously installed 4.1BSD machine, with a second disk to install v8 onto. Part of the installation requires you to compile your own kernel. I ran into a bit of problems as it’s not a 100% process, but after referencing this guide from David du Colombier, I had the system up and running. Naturally reading the installation manual helped a great deal too.

As always there is strange artifacts left in the backup, such as this scoreboard from rogue:

You will have to bring your own copy of the SIMH VAX-11/780 simulator. As of 31/3/2017 ther is issues with the github version of SIMH, and you will have issues with the disks on the VAX. You need to disable the async with a simple set command in your ini file:

set noasync

And you should now be good to go! As always you’ll have to battle the 404 page for the correct link and the username & password.

The GNU C compiler is now available for ftp from the file
/u2/emacs/gcc.tar on prep.ai.mit.edu. This includes machine
descriptions for vax and sun, 60 pages of documentation on writing
machine descriptions (internals.texinfo, internals.dvi and Info
file internals).

This also contains the ANSI standard (Nov 86) C preprocessor and 30
pages of reference manual for it.

This compiler compiles itself correctly on the 68020 and did so
recently on the vax. It recently compiled Emacs correctly on the
68020, and has also compiled tex-in-C and Kyoto Common Lisp.
However, it probably still has numerous bugs that I hope you will
find for me.

I will be away for a month, so bugs reported now will not be
handled until then.

If you can’t ftp, you can order a compiler beta-test tape from the
Free Software Foundation for $150 (plus 5% sales tax in
Massachusetts, or plus $15 overseas if you want air mail).

Free Software Foundation
1000 Mass Ave
Cambridge, MA 02138

[tapes are generally in Unix tar format. If you have other needs,
write to the above address, and ask if they can be met. -len]

And indeed, the files are dated 22/03/1987 making this the first public release of GCC.

GNU CC is a fairly portable optimizing C compiler intended for
machines with 32-bit words that have several registers and address
memory in terms of 8-bit bytes. It supports full ANSI standard C, not
including libraries (which we do not consider to be part of a
compiler).
Currently we have working machine descriptions for the Vax and for
the 68000/68020 (including 68881 support).
Optimizations performed by GNU CC include:

GNU CC runs about as fast as PCC.
Most of the optimizations are machine-independent or controlled by a
machine description. GNU CC takes advantage of all the 68020
addressing modes that we can see how to make the Sun assembler
assemble. Debugging output for DBX is available whether you request
optimization or not.

Seeing as 4.3BSD didn’t ship until 1988, I went ahead and set out to build this on 4.2BSD. The first stumbling block I hit is that GCC needs bison. The oldest version of bison I have is 1.25 which honestly is just too new! However in the same location as GCC is this file gnu1988.tar.bz2 which contains all of the current GNU software of 1988! And what is on that tape?

bison-1.00

gcc-1.21

gdb-2.5.1

gplusplus-1.21

libgplusplus

So this is probably as old as it is going to get, so I downloaded and went to compile bison, however getopt is a missing call! A creative search found getopt.c and even better PCC liked it enough to get a running bison so I could then configure GCC.

Configuring GCC is a manual process, but not too involved:

Make a symbolic link from file `config.h’ to the top-level
config file for the machine you are using. Its name should be
`config-MACHINE.h’. This file is responsible for
defining information about the host machine. It includes
`tm.h’.

Make a symbolic link from `tm.h’ to the machine-description
macro file for your machine (its name should be
`tm-MACHINE.h’).

Make a symbolic link from `md’ to the
machine description pattern file (its name should be
`MACHINE.md’)

Make a symbolic link from
`aux-output.c’ to the output-subroutine file for your machine
(its name should be `MACHINE-output.c’).Make sure the Bison parser generator is installed.Build the compiler. Just type `make’ in the compiler directory.

And in a minute I had GCC compiled. I ran it with -v and got this output:

# gcc -v
ld /lib/crt0.o -lc
Undefined:
_main

It really is nowhere near as featured as 1.21 that is for sure! So time to do a simple hello world program:

Years ago, I was given an image of VMS 4.7. I only tested it for idle capabilities, and that is as far as I got with it. I never used it for anything else.

But today I needed to verify my Win32 Hecnet project works, so I needed to generate some legit DECNet traffic. Luckily I still have the VMS image, and in the prevailing years I managed to get a copy of PathWorks for Windows NT (And one for MS-DOS as well!).

So googling around, I found blinkenbone who mentions the command needed to setup some DECNet love. Now the one thing that is strange about DECNet is that the MAC address needs to be changed to the DECNet area & node id. Thankfully there is an online calculator, powerdog. Since I’m just testing, I’ll put my VAX in area 1, node 1, that means the VAX MAC needs to be set to:

AA-00-04-00-01-04

So in SIMH, I just use the line:

set xq mac=AA-00-04-00-01-04

Cool. Now I use ansicon, in the hopes it’ll make the console better, and fire up VMS.

This procedure will help you define the parameters needed to get DECnet
running on this machine. You will be shown the changes before they are
executed, in case you wish to perform them manually.

What do you want your DECnet node name to be? : rabbit
What do you want your DECnet address to be? : 1.1
Do you want to operate as a router? [NO (nonrouting)]:
Do you want a default DECnet account? [YES]:

So it’d been a while since I’ve booted it up, and I just went with the 3.8-2 rc2 release (I forget did that version ever get released..?) Anyways since I wanted to run my SIMH instance under a Linux VM..

Soooo I went through some fun to recompile it as a 32bit binary, as the slirp doesn’t work on 64bit machines..

I just built the 11/780 emulator as I wanted to run 4.3 UWisc on my VM (in a VM)..

As a reminder the installation instructions for 4.3 BSD Uwisc can be found on gunkies, and all the files needed are on sourceforge. Also the 4.x BSD if_de.c driver errors out on receiving packets, and I’ve found it easier to just remove the error checking from the driver, and recompile the kernel and just boot that up.

I’m thinking of rebuilding the login process on 4.3 BSD to bring back AberMud, and self service user creation. Years ago I used to host all kinds of ancient UNIX, and I’d like to bring back at least one..

It’s been a long while since I’ve posted anything VAX BSD related. So I found this ISO image a while back that had all these old versions of BSD on them, but sadly many of them are incomplete, missing parts, and give really no clue on how to use them. There is even some duplication thrown in there just to complicate things further. So I figured I’d try one of them, an interim release of 4 BSD and see if I could just overlay a newer release version and see what I get…

I never was that much into MUD’s but after reading this and this, I decided to go for it. Looking here, I thought I’d go with David Kinder’s revamping of the version 2 source.

I figured I’d try to run AberMUD on 2.11BSD / PDP-11 which didn’t go so well.. I know there is issues with the word size (it tries to switch on longs which it doesn’t like, I changed them to int’s and.. well sigbus. Not to mention I had to link with overlays and well.. I get the feeling you actually have to do something not just trust the linker.

32v is just too crusty, along with 3.0 BSD. 4.2 BSD was lacking a few functions (memcpy/strchr) so I grabbed some replacements and it just crashed. Looking back AberMUD dates from the late 1980’s so I figured 4.3 BSD would be a far better match. And I figured 4.3 from Wisconsin would certainly work the best for my needs. This time, only a minimal amount of hacking on the source was required, and more importantly it worked!

The next thing I figured I’d do is put it online. Now my VPS runs a 64bit version of Linux, and seeing this is a VAX exe/OS I’ll need to run it on SIMH. Since I’m going to allow people to telnet it (I guess I could go thru some hell with the serial line mux) I’ll need my SLiRP build of SIMH, which only runs clean as a 32bit exe. So to get things started, first install 32bit support on x86_64 debian like this:

apt-get install ia32-libs

Then using Slackware 13.37, I made my exe, and uploaded it… And it worked fine! I also set the cpu to throttle at 3% so I don’t get into trouble for running 100% of the time, and it’ll be about as slow as a real VAX 11/730… It’s a simple line in SIMH, but I tend to misplace things so here it is.

set throttle 3%

Simple, right?

Well I thought I’d make one more change. I hate those systems that make you login to run the designated program that you went there for in the first place. At the same time, this VM is born to MUD, why not let it MUD all the time? Simply replacing /bin/login with mud.1 let me do just that. And of course I could just add an option in mud.1 to allow me to have a normal OS login. Simple, right? Not to mention it works on the console just fine.

So, let’s connect!

telnet vpsland.superglobalmegacorp.com

I suppose I could hook up flashterm to it later, but for now, telnet on in. I’ve never run a MUD before so I guess we’ll see. Worst case it’ll suck and crash and the only evidence will be the tape image, and this post.

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